Lennart Poettering, creator of open source sound server PulseAudio, was recently interviewed at this year's Linux Plumbers Conference. In this Q&A he details the latest PulseAudio developments and addresses some of PA's critics. Thanks to PulseAudio, the Linux audio experience is becoming more context-aware. For example, if a video is running in one application the system should now automatically reduce the volume of everything else and increase it when the video is finished.

PulseAudio should be able to be shipped with a default set of configuration settings and pretty much work by now. If it can't then there's something wrong.

The fact that Lennart feels the need to go into that much detail in that mail and that PulseAudio seems to be that finely balanced points to serious problems. I have never seen or heard of even something like JACK requiring that fine balancing act and the kind of latencies he's blaming on kernel configuration there sound way out of kilter and are completely unverifiable.

Maybe because most people who use JACK use a custom compiled realtime-kernel and carefully selected, well supported audio hardware? Also, JACK is used with apps that have been carefully written to support it.

JACK has a very different feature set from PulseAudio. The overlap is pretty small. It's possible that they will "grow together" at one time in the future but that's not even on the roadmap today.

With PulseAudio, people use it with all kinds of cheap hardware with crappy ALSA drivers, badly coded, closed source software with all kinds of ugly hacks. When ANYTHING in the chain doesn't work properly, be it a stupid kernel configuration like Ubuntu's default one, missing features of the ALSA drivers, badly coded applications that does all kinds of tricks to bypass the proper, well emulated ALSA APIs, they blame it on PulseAudio. *sigh*